Reviews

Crazy Samurai: 400 vs 1 (2021)

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I love a shameless gimmick, and few films are as up-front about theirs as the martial arts mini-epic Crazy Samurai: 400 vs. 1. It was originally called Crazy Samurai Musashi in its film festival run, but its marketing has since doubled down on highlighting its overriding gimmick right there in the title. Even official posters that stick to the original Musashi subtitle declare in large block letters “400 VS. 1 IN A SINGLE TAKE” just so you know what you’re paying for: a 90min movie with a continuous 77min shot of a samurai swordfighting 400 opponents to the death. Unfortunately, Crazy Samurai cannot live up to the movie you imagine in your head when you read that premise. It’s basically an SOV backyard movie with an exceptionally large cast, not a feature-length action set piece with an endless parade of expertly choreographed kills. Bummer.

Crazy Samurai starts at the climax of a three-hour samurai epic that was never filmed, assuming that the audience is already familiar with samurai Miyamoto Musashi’s reputation and his legendary battle with 400 fallen swordsmen. Fair enough; maybe we should be. If you aren’t, there’s no reason to show up for this single-gimmick movie except to see the hour-long swordfight, so why waste time. Unfortunately, despite the length of that battle, there isn’t much to see. Musashi is surrounded by a never-ending supply of swordsmen who take turns lunging at him and dying monotonous deaths – dispensed of with a quick swipe of his blade and a uniform spurt of CGI blood. If you watch the first five minutes of the fight you know exactly what the last five minutes will look like, as the sword violence never really escalates in any satisfying way. It’s more of a video game tutorial than a movie.

Crazy Samurai does for sword violence what Free Fire does for guns: making you numb with relentless repetition to the point where you never want to see the weapon again, like a concerned parent making you smoke an entire carton of cigarettes until you puke. Free Fire was a lot more fun to watch, though. The only hook that kept my attention in this one was the impressive physicality of actor Tak Sakaguchi as the (sometimes) titular samurai. Watching him swing his sword at literal hundreds of nameless goons for over an hour, I thought back to how sore I am after 15min of shoveling garden soil in my own backyard; he looks genuinely broken down by the end of the film, and you feel that exhaustion in your bones. Unfortunately, that’s the only thing that changes as the fight drags on, and it’s too gradual of an arc to hold your attention even at this short length.

In a best-case scenario, Crazy Samurai is a proof-of-concept prototype of a much better film that’s still to be made. There’s a brief epilogue obviously filmed years after the long-take centerpiece that delivers exactly what I wanted out of this movie, but it only lasts a couple minutes. You can practically hear director (and well-respected fight choreographer) Yûji Shimomura explaining “Here’s what I could’ve done with this premise now that I have access to better resources”, which makes me wonder why he didn’t just start over. There honestly isn’t much worth salvaging in this version except proof that it could be done. Maybe it was preserved & distributed out of respect for Tak Sakaguchi’s endurance-test performance, which is sweet, but the film’s in obvious need of a better-funded revision with more varied, harder-hitting kills.

-Brandon Ledet

Master (2021)

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It has officially been a full calendar year since I saw Blumhouse’s The Invisible Man at AMC Westbank, which was the last time I watched any movie in a proper indoor theater. There hasn’t exactly been a cinematic drought in the year since the pandemic started, since plenty of delayed-distribution festival releases (and filmed-in-lockdown experiments like Host) have rushed in to fill the void left by the major players who’re still waiting out this never-ending shitstorm. As much as I love a good low-budget arthouse provocation, I’ve come to miss seeing large-scale blockbusters at the local megaplex over the past year, especially as another dreary summer season approaches. Of the big-budget action spectacles that have been missing from my movie diet, I most miss the sprawling Indian blockbusters that play at AMC Elmwood, often to sparse, weirdly unenthused audiences. Catching over-the-top action movies like 2.0, War, and Saaho on the big screen has made for some of my most satisfying cinematic experiences of the past few years, as they’re often far more daring & entertaining than their timid American equivalents – including supposedly eccentric franchises like Fast & Furious and Mission: Impossible. It was a wonderful gift, then, that the recent Tamil-language blockbuster Master appeared on Amazon Prime mere weeks after its theatrical run. I’m still nowhere near comfortable with returning to the megaplex even as our local vaccine rollout escalates, so I very much appreciated getting a small taste of the over-the-top action spectacles I’ve been missing over the past year.

Master is a Kollywood action blockbuster throwback to 90s American thrillers like Dangerous Minds where real Tough Cookie teachers fight to save impoverished, overlooked students from lives of petty street crime. In this variation, an alcoholic college professor quickly sobers up when he is assigned to teach troubled youth at a juvenile correctional facility, only to discover that the kids are being preyed upon by a local gangster (and corrupt union organizer) who frames them for crimes committed by his adult underlings. Even as a sloppy drunk in the first act, the Badass Teacher is treated with the wide-eyed hero worship afforded action stars like Schwarzenegger, Van Damme, and Stallone in their 1990s heyday. He wears his sunglasses inside, wields his pocket flask as a weapon, has several badass theme songs that refer to him as “Master the Blaster” (including a reggae diddy that eventually becomes his ringtone), and periodically winks at the camera to remind you to have fun. Meanwhile, his union-gangster nemesis is an ice-cold sociopath who’s so freakishly strong he can murder his victims with a single punch (including, it should be said, small children on several occasions). Their head-to-head battlegrounds are stereotypical action locales like warehouses, construction sites, and meat lockers, but most of the drama unfolds in classrooms where they compete for control of the neighborhood children’s minds & freedom. Really, the only thing that’s missing is the titular Master going full Michelle Pfeiffer by turning his chair backwards to appear tough & cool to the youths, accompanied—of course—by the Tamil equivalent of Coolio. There are plenty of Gully Boy-style rap songs on the soundtrack, though, so it’s not exactly an opportunity missed.

I genuinely believe India’s various, disparate movie industries are currently making the best big-budget action flicks in the world, the same way that Hong Kong martial arts thrillers hit an unmatched creative high in the 1980s. Admittedly, Master is not my favorite example of this trend. I wish its action set pieces & lengthy dance breaks had escalated more drastically post-intermission to push its premise into full-blown delirium, but for the most part it’s still three hours well spent. The combat is brutal, the melodrama is wonderfully saccharine, and there’s a song with the lyrics “Problems will come & go/Chill a bit, bro” that legit unclenched my jaw. I also can’t discount the instant rush of pleasure I got just by having access to this kind of cinema again, something I usually only encounter at the megaplex. As soon as the endless production cards & multiple-language health warnings (about the dangers of drinking in this case, of course) kicked off the minutes-long opening credits I knew I was about to be spoiled with some Grade A action entertainment. I hope that when my community is sufficiently vaccinated and I feel comfortable with the moviegoing ritual again, these films will still be on the menu at 20-screen monstrosities like AMC Elmwood. I miss them very much.

-Brandon Ledet

Things (1989)

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The closing credits of the 1989 bargain-bin horror novelty Things declares in fuzzed-out block letters, “YOU HAVE JUST EXPERIENCED THINGS.” That kind of neutral, matter-of-fact statement is truly the only way this movie can be assessed, as if it were more of a unit of time or a natural disaster than it is a work of art. Things is delirious, direct-to-video Canuxploitation nonsense – a scuzzy hangout horror filmed on Super 8 and filtered through beat up VHS tapes. It’s near-budgetless & near-plotless, essentially just documenting a small group of Canadian horror nerds as they hang around one buddy’s bleakly dingy home, playing with homemade monster puppets and pretending that they’re Making A Movie. Its ineptitude drifts between disturbing dream logic & mind-numbing tedium so fluently that it’s near-impossible to determine whether it’s Good or Awful as a whole. And yet, it’s fondly remembered as a regional horror gem in cult-movie circles, because genre-trash Canadians are intensely loyal to their own subculture runoff. I cannot stress how much I admire that.

In the abstract, there’s a kind of sub-Cronenbergian body horror element to the premise, in which a couple’s desperate attempts at artificial insemination gives birth to an insectoid mutant creature that must be destroyed. The movie isn’t really about the couple or the mad scientist who created the ant-beast, though. Most scenes just feature a trio of buddies drinking cheap beer in that couple’s living room, while tangential interjections from outside the house occasionally gesture at the vague outline of a plot. This tactic includes sporadic news reports from vintage porn goddess Amber Lynn as TV reporter Amber Lynn, who appears to have filmed her contributions to the picture in less time than it took her to get in make-up. Things smartly paves over a lot of its incoherence with good ol’ Dream Logic, starting the whole thing off with a nightmare sequence just to set the tone. That does little to forgive the long stretches where absolutely nothing happens, and the characters trapped in its no-budget purgatory complain to the audience, “This is so boring.” I can’t help but agree, but its complete lack of purpose or urgency is—against all odds—charming, especially whenever the insectoid baby-mutant shows up to party.

Things mostly survives on the tried-and-true horror formula that Ineptitude + Time = Art. Its rubber monster puppets, Atom & His Package drum machine score, and general Tim & Eric awkwardness are adorable enough to leave most B-horror audiences with a positive feeling, even if we can’t remember exactly what we just “experienced.” The thing that really sticks out to me, though, is the way the actors can barely hold back their smirks, even in scenes where they’re supposedly being attacked by a mutant insect baby. The real joy here is not in what happens onscreen, but in the movie’s trajectory from a weekend art project between friends to a beloved Canuxploitation gem. Things has been cited as “perhaps the worst movie ever made” on several occasions, but even its status as the body horror version of The Room is a sign of respect in my eyes, a testament to Torontonians’ collective interest in exalting their own no-budget genre trash. I sincerely wish our own regional genre nerd community in New Orleans was strong enough to turn movies like Mardi Gras Massacre or The Last Slumber Party into cult classics in the same way.

-Brandon Ledet

Wizards (1977)

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As a lifelong fan of both hand-drawn animation & flippant transgression, I’ve long been curious about Ralph Bakshi’s art. However, there’s a strong whiff of edgelordism wafting from his work that’s becoming less & less enticing as a I grow older, making me wonder if I could have only ever become a true Bakshi devotee if I had caught his films on late-night cable when I was still a teenage shithead. Maybe that’s why I thought the fantasy film Wizards would be the best introduction to Bakshi in his prime, as it’s the most mainstream he was willing to go as an artist (at least before his professional nadir with the notorious flop Cool World, which I have seen before, unfortunately). Even Bakshi himself pitches Wizards as a “family picture” meant to prove that he can make good art without stirring up moral outrage as a crass provocateur. Judging only by that metric, the film is a failure. It’s just absolutely swarmed with buxom nudists, battlefield gore, and Nazi iconography, making its PG rating an absolute joke even by 1970s standards. It’s at least a gorgeously animated provocation, though, surely inspiring many margin doodles in metalhead stoners’ notebooks to come.

Wizards is set on a distant-future Earth after we’ve all nuked each other to near extinction, then mutated into grotesque beasts in the radioactive remains of our former world. The movie ascribes to a very simplistic Cute = Good, Ugly = Evil philosophy, contrasting the grotesque humanoid leftovers of humanity with adorable elves & fairies who return to our realm as an sign of Nature reclaiming the planet. This contrast is extended to a clash between magic (Good) & technology (Evil), with both sides represented by respective twin wizards who are destined to battle in the post-Apocalyptic wasteland. The Good Wizard loves Peace and is frustratingly reluctant to fight his wicked brother despite the ongoing destruction of their shared planet (and the promise of “a second Holocaust”). The Evil Wizard loves War and hypes up his mutant humanoid frog army with vintage Nazi propaganda, wielding a “dream machine” film projector as if it were a weapon of mass destruction. The resulting D&D campaign illustration is neither as obnoxiously crass as Heavy Metal nor as deliriously fun as Gandahar, falling somewhere between the two as a wonderfully animated mediocrity (although it was likely a direct influence on both).

There’s something adorable about Bakshi believing this is a family-friendly variation on his work, the same way it’s adorable that Richard Kelly believed he made a toned-down mainstream thriller in The Box. The gleeful gun violence, slack-jawed ogling at erect fairy nipples, and edgelord deployment of Nazi propaganda is all exceedingly queasy, stubbornly faithful to the confrontationally grotesque vision of Bakshi’s earlier films like Coonskin & Fritz the Cat. You could never shrug his work off as lazy provocations, though, at least not in terms of their technical artistry. Every hideous mutant, bodacious fairy babe, and Nazi war crime is wonderfully detailed in their illustration, often paired with gorgeous greenscreen backdrops of smoke & rolling clouds. Even when the budget wears thin and devolves into narrated slideshows & rotoscoped battlefield extras, Bakshi makes it appear as if it were all an intentional inclusion in his multimedia psychedelic tapestry. I didn’t fall in love with this animated prog rock album cover the way I did with René Laloux’s Gandahar, but it also didn’t quash my curiosity over Bakshi’s pricklier cult classics. He obviously deserves a closer look, even if only for the form and not the content.

-Brandon Ledet

Baby’s Day Out (1994)

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When I was a kid, we had a Baby’s Day Out promotional beach towel in the house, a glaring outlier among our more generic poolside laundry. I have no idea how we acquired such a precious pop-art object, but it did its job as an advertisement. In fact, it over-achieved. Long after the novelty of this box office bomb had been forgotten to time by the majority of 1990s America, Baby’s Day Out remained a household name within our family – all thanks to a sun-faded, increasingly ratty beach towel. I was not shocked, then, to recently find a DVD copy of the film lurking in my family’s physical media giveaway pile without having encountered it any other context in the decades since. I was a little shocked by the actual content of the film, though, which is just as much hyperviolent torture porn as it is wholesome Family Entertainment. We might as well have had a cutesy beach towel commemorating the release of The Silence of the Lambs.

The truth is Baby’s Day Out doesn’t deserve to be remembered, as it’s essentially just the reheated leftovers of much more successful, beloved films. In this Frankenstein experiment, producer John Hughes shamelessly attempts to recreate his past Home Alone & Ferris Bueller successes by setting a tiny infant baby loose in downtown Chicago with accident-prone gangsters on its tail. The gangsters desperately want to hold the heroic Baby Bink hostage for a ransom-money payoff from his rich-asshole parents. Meanwhile, Baby Bink continually escapes their grasp to visit the various locations of his favorite bedtime storybook: the bus stop, the zoo, the park, the construction site, etc. Each set piece is introduced with a serene storybook illustration, then offers various life-threatening perils for the Home Alone-knockoff gangsters to stumble directly into as they watch their Big Score crawl away totally unharmed.

The plot-necessary connective tissue between the film’s set pieces is a chore, but the Looney Tunes chase scenes are hilariously over-the-top in their bone-crunching hyperviolence when considered in isolation. Baby’s Day Out is a cutesy tour of Chicago for Baby Bink, but it’s a hellish endurance contest for the boneheaded mobster villains who seek to exploit him. They take sledgehammers to their skulls. They fall off rooftops and smash their genitals against the AC window units below. Their bones are shattered by animatronic gorillas at the zoo. The finale transforms an everyday construction site into a towering medieval torture chamber. At one point, the movie even abandons the conceit that Baby Bink is blissfully unaware of all this hideous, cosmic-justice pain when he deliberately lights Joe Mantegna’s genitals on fire so he can gleefully crawl off to the next stop on his Chicagoan tourist itinerary. So, he’s either a ruthless infant vigilante or just a fucked up little hedonist with no regard for the trail of dead he leaves on his selfish sightseeing daytrip – no in-between.

There was obviously a lot of naïve hope that Baby’s Day Out would be a major hit. Everything from its canceled tie-in video game to its teased Baby’s Trip to China sequel hints at a sad, misguided Movie Studio optimism. Instead, it lives on as a disturbing novelty, remembered only by the 90s Kids™ whose homes were cursed with its promotional beach towels & bargain-bin DVDs. When scanning Google Image Search for said beach towel, I could only find these nightmarish auction lots of props worn & operated by Vern Troyer as the baby’s stunt double (his first job in the entertainment industry, poor guy). That shock is a perfect encapsulation of what revisiting this film as an adult feels like. You expect something cute & harmless, but instead find a hard stare into the pitch-black abyss of human cruelty & folly. It’s just as deeply unsettling as it is delightfully inane.

-Brandon Ledet

Tank Girl (1995)

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As much as I love Birds of Prey, I’m still in shock that a Major Studio superhero movie ended up landing in my personal Top 5 films of 2020, much less Swampflix’s collective Top 10. The hyper-violent, hyper-femme irreverence of that film feels like a major disruption of the usual smash-em-up superhero tedium, if not only for the novelty of watching Women Behaving Badly in the context of a mainstream action movie. That doesn’t mean that Birds of Prey is a total anomaly, though. In fact, its major precedent is decades-old at this point, a similarly anarchic Girls Doing Violence superhero gem from the way-back-when of the 1990s. There is strong proto-Birds of Prey energy running throughout the 90s adaptation of Tank Girl, right down to Margot Robbie & Lori Petty doing the same Sadistic Betty Boop Voice as their films’ respective antihero leads. It’s a shame neither movie was a hit, since they’re easily the most exciting specimens of superhero media since Burton revamped Batman as a fetishistic horndog.

Lori Petty stars as the titular Tank Girl, a sugar-addled rebel scavenger in the not-too-distant-future of 2033. Water is in scarce supply, leaving a power vacuum filled by the mega-corporation Water & Power (not to be confused with the infamous enema porno Water Power) under the direction of evil overlord Malcolm McDowell. The water-rich oligarchy in this Mad Maxian desertscape entertain themselves at Hype Williams-style future-brothels; the resistance is led by mutant kangaroos; and Naomi Watts hangs around as a sidekick brunette. As with Birds of Prey, none of these plot details or set-decoration eccentricities matter nearly as much as the central performance that anchors them. Lori Petty bounces off the walls as a manic Bugs Bunny anarchist, openly mocking every inane indignity that distracts from the one thing she loves: blowing shit up in her girlified battle tank. Like with Robbie’s Harley Quinn, Petty’s Tank Girl is the blinding fireworks show at the center of this film, and everyone else is just there to gaze at it in wonder – even the mutant kangaroos.

It’s incredible that the Tank Girl movie doesn’t have more of a prominent legacy in the pop culture zeitgeist. The only time I remember this film being around was when Comedy Central was looping some cut-to-ribbons edit of it to pad out their daytime broadcasts in the early 2000s. I was fascinated by the out-of-context snippets I would catch from those broadcasts as a kid, but never enough to watch it from start to end (a feat I’m not sure anyone’s accomplished with any commercial-padded Comedy Central movie broadcast). I was taken aback, then, that the actual movie is so unapologetically Vulgar. Tank Girl has enough Saturday Morning Cartoon energy that it feels like it was made for kids, but Petty’s hyperactive antihero is an omnisexual social anarchist who challenges every taboo she can point a tank at, like Bugs Bunny smooching Elmer Fudd in drag. In just a slightly better world, that kind of horned-up flippancy would be celebrated as one of the all-time-great superhero performances, but 25 years later we still live in a world where Birds of Prey was allowed to tank at the box office (even though it improves a lot of this film’s already stellar chaotic highs through revision). I don’t get it.

A lot of early-MTV Cool was deployed to boost this movie’s marketability, including a Björk-scored strip club routine, an Iggy Pop cameo, and an opening-credits remix of DEVO’s “Girl U Want.” Still, you can tell it was underfunded & under-supported in its time, if not only because many of its transitional exterior shots & action sequences are supplanted with panels from the original Tank Girl comic. I found that choice to be a boon to the movie’s stylistic palette—borrowing a post-Love & Rockets indie comics patina from the source material—but it’s also frustrating that a vision this fun & this idiosyncratic was left so scrappy while contemporary superhero tripe like Spawn, The Phantom, and Judge Dredd were just torching piles of cash. I would have loved to see Rachel Talalay’s Tank Girl vision on the scale of Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey budget. Recent history has only proven that it would’ve still been ignored & discarded, but you can’t account for general audiences’ lack of taste. This is the superhero media that should be culturally celebrated & exalted, but instead we’re still struggling to shake off the dour, self-serious conservatism of the Nolan era; shame on us all.

-Brandon Ledet

Space Sweepers (2021)

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There haven’t been any new releases during this neverending pandemic that have made me miss the big-budget blockbuster experience. Maybe it’s because titles like Tenet, Mulan, and Wonder Woman ’84 have been locked behind exorbitantly expensive paywalls, followed by a mile-high wave of tepid reviews. There have been plenty of mind-melting arthouse experiments released straight to VOD in the last year that I would have loved to have seen in a proper theater, but it feels as if the bigger studios have been holding back The Good Stuff when it comes to their money-making popcorn movies. Space Sweepers is the definitive end to that drought. The straight-to-Netflix Korean blockbuster is the exact kind of sci-fi pulp entertainment I miss seeing on the big screen with easily pleased opening-weekend crowds and buckets of overpriced snacks. It’s doubtful that Netflix would have ever released Space Sweepers to giant-screen multiplexes even in “Normal” times, but all the same it’s the first film released in the past year that truly made me miss the summer blockbuster ritual.

Like with all multiplex blockbusters, the action sequences in Space Sweepers are a confounding CGI cacophony, just as difficult to remember after the credits as they are to comprehend in the moment. I was genuinely lost during the opening set piece, in which rival crews of space-junk scavengers race for possession of a malfunctioning satellite or cargo vessel or whatever. It’s the character beats between those blurred-CG action sequences that distinguish these monster-budget sci-fi spectacles anyway. In this case, the audience plays stowaway with a motley crew of intergalactic junkyard scavengers captained by The Handmaiden‘s Kim Tae-ri. Their go-nowhere routine of working their way deeper & deeper into debt is disrupted when they accidentally scoop up a dangerous bomb disguised as the most adorable child in the universe. That pricey, lethal, cute-as-a-button cargo puts them at odds with an evil white capitalist who runs what’s remaining of humanity as a technocratic megacorporation. The resulting conflict is essentially The Guardians of the Galaxy vs. Elon Musk, with all the money-torching glut & irreverent, character-based humor that descriptor implies.

Space Sweepers works best as an intergalactic hangout film. Any scene that doesn’t involve the ragtag space crew interacting with their adorable kid/bomb cargo can only feel generic by comparison, including all the laser shoot-outs & space-chase action sequences that eat up most of the budget. The more you get to know the crew the easier it is to be charmed by the film at large. From the tough-guy lone wolves learning to care for a defenseless child-bomb to the transgender android scrounging spare credits to purchase their ideal body (a much more explicit version of the allegory teased in Alita: Battle Angel), it’s a pure joy getting to know these reformed reprobates. I also cannot stress enough how cute the kid-bomb they’re debating whether to sell is. The cutest. It’s the exact effect I get from most big-budget crowdpleasers at the multiplex: I may forget everything that happens to them, but if the characters are likeable enough than I don’t really care. These characters are very, very likeable, and I’d happily pay money to see their adventures continue with an in-the-flesh crowd on the other side of this eternal hell year.

-Brandon Ledet

4×4 (2021)

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I love a good high-concept gimmick. Any premise that feels like it was pitched as scribbles on a bar napkin calls out to me like an irresistible Siren song – whether it’s “haunted Zoom call“, “killer cocktail dress“, or “cannibal mermaid musical“. As a result, the bar-napkin premise for the new Argentine cheapie 4×4 was too good to pass up. 4×4 is a single-location, confined-space thriller about a petty thief who gets trapped in a high-tech “bait car”, then tormented for days by his victim-turned-captor. Basically, “bait car torture porn.” It mostly delivers on that gimmick for its first hour too (even if the concept feels a decade stale). We are trapped in the bait-car torture chamber with our unlucky-thief protagonist for a miserable, laughable stretch of high-concept cruelty, making for some highly entertaining modern exploitation trash. Then, 4×4 commits a major sin; it abandons its gimmick for a stubbornly traditional, moralistic conclusion outside the car-prison, ruining its trashy appeal for a last-minute attempt at respectability. Bummer.

After an opening-credits montage of security cameras, locked gates, and barbed-wire fences spotted on the streets of Buenos Aires, we jump right into the central action of the story. A thief in soccer hooligan drag breaks into a parked SUV and removes the car’s radio, then pisses on the backseat as a childish prank. He immediately regrets that prank, though, as he ends up spending the next few days of his life soaking in his own piss. The car doors are locked; the windows are polarized & bulletproofed; he’s an isolated prisoner, made to spend endless days in solitary confinement as his rich-asshole captor taunts him over the would-be stolen radio. Most of the torture is the confinement itself; outside of the car’s AC system being weaponized for bursts of extreme cold & extreme heat, the thief is mostly just left to stew in his own repugnant juices & stench. His only water source is the condensation he licks off the car windows in the morning hours. His only escapes are the delirious dreams he has while starved & dehydrated. His only company is the villainous voice on the radio that holds him captive . . . until that villain ruins the movie by insisting on facing his victim in person, outside of the car.

The ideal version of 4×4 would stick to the confines of its commanding gimmick. It starts off on the right foot with the weaponized AC unit & bullets ricocheting off the unbreakable windows, but the booby traps should have exponentially escalated from there. Transforming an ordinary SUV into a mechanized torture chamber leaves plenty of room for over-the-top gimmickry. Unfortunately, the movie shies away from its true destiny as a inane high-concept thriller to instead stage a spirited communal debate about the morality of vigilante justice. Instead of sawblade steering wheels, trash-compactor seating, or tentacled seatbelts, we get a sober, both-sidesing conversation about street crime & wealth-disparity that asks empty rhetorical questions like “What is happening to us as a society?” What a letdown. No one’s going to seek this movie out for its philosophical insights on the morality of petty theft or vigilante justice. Even if that were the case, it ultimately doesn’t have much to say on the topic. The audience is only on the hook for the bar-napkin promise of killer-SUV hijinks, and the movie’s outright cruel to drive away without satisfying that vehicular bloodlust.

-Brandon Ledet

I Care a Lot (2021)

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The Swampflix Crew were generally big fans of the twisty psychological thriller Unsane a few summers back, but it was very divisive in other circles. The way Soderbergh mined the real-life horrors of involuntary hospitalization & insurance scams at the expense of the mentally ill for cheap-o genre entertainment was a major turn-off for a lot of that film’s audience, understandably so. And now I have to wonder what that crowd would make of the recent Netflix release I Care A Lot, which mines the real-life exploitation of the elderly for something even less respectful: a flippant black comedy. At least Unsane was fully dedicated to making the bureaucratic nightmare at its core as visibly ugly & spiritually repugnant as possible. By contrast, I Care a Lot uses its own exploitative health industry scam as a convenient springboard for a candy-coated slapstick comedy about an overachieving #girlboss with a killer wardrobe. Regardless of that choice’s morality or its likely divisiveness, I have to admit that the clash between film’s pitch-black cruelty & sugary irreverence is exactly what endeared it to me.

Rosamund “Gone Girl” Pike is typecast as a vicious, unrepentant monster with an A-type personality and a blunt Lime Cat bob. As a professional “caretaker” & “guardian,” she “earns” her designer wardrobe & lavish home off the backs of her elderly “clients”, whom she traps in legally-forced conservatorships that park them in prison-like retirement homes while she liquidates their funds on the outside. It’s a scam that should be familiar to the audience by now, both through the 2017 investigative article in The New Yorker that likely inspired the film and, more recently, through the ongoing #FreeBritney scandal that’s effectively made “conservatorship” the dictionary word of the year. Maybe that’s why the movie quickly gets bored with dwelling on the details of the scam, then shifts focus to gawking at the heartless inhumanity of the criminals who profit off it. Pike’s blatantly exploitative business is essentially a legally-sanctioned version of organized crime (as her grift requires behind-closed-doors cooperation from doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies for a share in the profit). So, the movie pits her against a network of actual mobsters, testing the limits of her power-hungry cruelty in a rapidly escalating mob war that highlights the disturbing parallels between both sides. It’s all very silly, while also never losing sight of the real-life bitterness at its center.

I don’t know that this film has anything especially insightful to say about the forced-conservatorship scam in particular or even the evils of late-stage Capitalism at large. It’s more of a movie about the type of person who excels in those corrupt, unjust scenarios. No matter the minute-to-minute distractions of its broadly comedic plot, this is essentially a character study of All-American Capitalist Scum. In a system where the only two viable options are to exploit or be exploited, she’s playing the game exactly the way it’s designed to be played. The fucked-up thing is that it’s genuinely Fun to watch her win that game, even after getting an up-close look at the victims of her cruelty. Watching Pike model designer sunglasses, pull on giant cigar-sized vapes, and rapidly force a sugary-smile as if she were firing a gun is endlessly entertaining, and you can tell she’s gleefully enjoying the role. The movie’s both honest about the luxuries & pleasures of Capitalist power and the toll that level of Success takes on the most vulnerable members of your fellow citizenry. No matter how far it strays away from the real-life health industry exploitations of its first act into the cartoonish mobster war of its main plot, everything you need to know about how fucked up our modern healthcare & economic systems are can be seen in a quick flash of Pike’s sinisterly insincere smile.

I Care a Lot is an icy blast. Its plotting could be tighter, and even I have some serious issues with how it concludes, but neither of those nitpicks are enough to sour the acidic sugar rush that surrounds them. The film is just deeply, deeply mean and looks like pure candy, which is more than enough for me. I can’t promise those guilty pleasures will be enough to win everyone over, but I hope we can at least all get on the same page in praising Pike’s sociopathic ice queen performance. She should be allowed to run wild like this more often; cruelty suits her.

-Brandon Ledet

The Queen of Black Magic (2021)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

While he’s only credited as the film’s screenwriter, it’s tempting to frame Joko Anwar as the auteurist voice behind The Queen of Black Magic, given how snugly it falls in line with his recent work. The Queen of Black Magic repeats the returning-to-a-rural-home supernatural folktale horror of Anwar’s recent creep-out Impetigore. It also repeats the reinvention of an 80s Indonesian cult classic that he experimented with in 2017’s Satan’s Slaves. Unfortunately, director Kino Stamboel can’t match the pristine visual artistry or icy tension of either of those recent Joko Anwar knockouts, which holds The Queen of Black Magic back from achieving their must-see horror nerd prestige. Still, Anwar’s storytelling & stylistic influence is blatant throughout, and the two collaborators build to a spectacularly upsetting climax together within the framework of the backseat auteur’s previous triumphs.

The Queen of Black Magic doesn’t have a plot so much as it has a premise. For most of its runtime, it’s a gory ghost story about a haunted orphanage infested with CGI centipedes. Then, it climaxes with the intrusion of the titular black magic queen, who exponentially escalates the scale of the mayhem in a deliberate attempt to create Hell on earth. Adult alumni of the rural orphanage return to their collective home with their Big City wives & children in tow as a kind of unconventional family reunion. Once home, they’re reminded of a supernatural menace that underscored their childhood memories, which they’ve since passed off as the product of their overactive imaginations. Except, the supernatural threat returns to their lives as soon as they return to the orphanage, and it’s explicitly linked to long-buried abuses against the other children there – an evil they unknowingly participated in and must be punished for. Once the supernatural avenger of these abuses shows herself in the third act and her centipede army grows by the ton, it becomes clear that no one will be spared her vengeful chaos, not even the men’s own innocent children.

Story-wise, this film is stubbornly unrushed & conventional. The backstory that provides purpose for its ghostly, centipedal gross-outs is mostly told through purely expositional flashbacks, all shot with the limited scope & unembarrassed cheese of a soap opera broadcast. Meanwhile, the dozen or so characters who’ve gathered at the haunted orphanage more or less just hang around, waiting for something spooky to happen. The atmosphere is effectively eerie, but the events it serves are oddly inert . . . until Hell is fully unleashed. The third-act payoffs to this film’s traditional haunted-house plotting are gloriously fucked up. Its skincrawl moments fearlessly go for the jugular, making it clear that no guilty party nor innocent bystander is safe from centipedal gore or possessed self-mutilation. The inciting child abuse against helpless orphans isn’t avenged with any kind of targeted fury, but rather a burn-it-all-down anger against the entire world for allowing such cruelty to happen. No one is spared; ignorance is complicity; everyone deserves Hell for living in such a callous world.

After the hideous spectacle of its Hell-on-Earth climax, The Queen of Black Magic concludes with stills of the 1981 original it’s supposedly remaking. Just from that slideshow, you can tell the original film was a lot lighter & less traumatizing, presumably with an entirely different premise than this “remake.” Between this film & Satan’s Slaves, Joko Anwar is acting as a kind of cultural ambassador for the merits of cult-classic Indonesian horrors – both reviving the titles of the films that spooked & delighted him as a kid and using them as templates to spook & delight a modern audience in kind. I can’t claim this effort is as satisfying as the previous two films that he directed himself, but it’s still effectively upsetting as a haunted-house genre film, one that’s done a great job of further piquing my curiosity in Indonesian horror classics.

-Brandon Ledet